As the main post points out this is pretty much a weekly news release from Microsoft. It's interesting because in some ways I get suprised by the severity of the bugs such as allowing a huge hole in the Java VM, that would allow someone to format your hard drive or a bug in Proxy Server that would allow a single mal-formed packed to max the CPU at 100%. On the other hand I'm suprised Microsoft doesn't have more of these bugs.
I think this is where the philosophical differences of Open Source Software really make a big difference. Even though OSS still has bugs, the live testing cycle is un-paralleled. However I think the biggest difference boils down to this: there is no one saying we have to have this product out the door by XX date. Rather it becomes stable when it's ready, but you can use the development version if you need or want.
As the lines of code in software grows and the complexity increases, I think we will see a greater number of more sever bugs in closed source systems. Ultimately I believe this will be one of the critical factors leading to OSS's long term success.
I have been using Mozilla because I love the tabbed browser windows. I was completely unaware of all the extra features it offers.
The DOM Inspector will be really nice for checking out the rendered structure of a page. I've always had a tough time with this since I generate most of my pages dynamically. In fact most of those tools will be *incredibly* useful in that context.
I have to say I'm really impressed with the progress the Mozilla team is making. For a while there IE was leading the way, now that trend has clearly reversed.
"Other applications developed at the Human Media Lab include a pair of robotic eyes that allow a computer to look back at the user"
People are already get skitish when they think someone is watching them, it would be interesting to see how they'd react when the computer really is watching them.
I wonder how well suited this technology will be for practical application. I'm a fan of the plan for spam laid out by Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html and as he notes in his articles one of the most important things with filters is the false positive rate. Will the computer be able to accurately assess if I'm in the middle of an important task and not disturb me? What if the incoming message is more important, and it's urgent that it distracts me? If they could solve these issues, I think it could have some potential. Interruptions are a big problem IMHO in the work place.
M$ Boot Disks If you have to build a boot disk for a M$ machine, putergeek is invaluable since M$ doesn't seem to want to you to boot to a DOS prompt any more. You can find Win95B, WinME and Dos Bootdisks. http://www.putergeek.com/downloads/
RegClean If you do any development using COM or ActiveX components then RegClean is a must have tool for fixing registry problems. http://download.com.com/3000-2094-88147 0.html?tag= list
PsTools Listed in the Article are FileMon and RegMon from Sysinternals.com, but I would add PsTools to that list. This suite of tools is incredibly useful for diagnosing and solving a vast array of problems. PsKill is probably my most frequently used tool when I need to actually KILL a process instead of politely requesting it to exit via End Task. Oh and nearly everything works on remote machines as well. http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ pstools.shtml
MDAC Utility If you have to deal with programs accessing a variety of Microsoft Data Access sources, the MDAC Component Checker is essential. It's unbelievable to me how typical it is that MDAC get's corrupted. www.microsoft.com/data
Unfortunately, most of the essential tools relate to Microsoft Software, but the reality is that it seems to be more difficult to find "good" utilities to trouble shoot and fix problems under a Microsoft OS than pretty much any other OS I've worked on. Microsoft also publishes a tool that will automatically identify any known security vulnerabilites that need to be patched, but I can't find the link off hand. Again for a Microsoft OS it is pretty handy.
I understood this to be a discussion forum, I wasn't aware we had to present original research in order to post.
Which of those technologies you cited, did you invent?
If you don't have anything to add to the discussion, just put down someone else's post?
Just because you already knew that, doesn't mean that everyone is as enlightened as you. I was excited by the prospect of the combination of the two technologies. I never thought it was an original idea, nor did I present it as such.
Fusion seems to be the ultimate goal for energy. Offering a clean and abundant power supply that could potentially alter our entire power production system. One of the problems with the transition to a hydrogen based economy has been that energy is required to extract the hydrogen from known reserves (petroleum, water, etc). The most common solution offered seems to be solar powered systems, however fusion could offer a great alternative which in the long run may prove more viable and more extensively useable than solar, hydro-electric, or wind power individually, maybe even collectively.
It's particularly encouraging to see the scientists questioned their results and tested for extraneous sources before publishing preliminary findings.
It sounds interesting, although it's hard to put too much weight into it yet because their results have yet to be independently verified. He also hasn't even shown it can "expel mangetic fields to conclusivlely prove that the state is superconducting."
At least the heading of the article was posted with a question mark, rather than as an authoritative claim.
If the claim proves to be true, it would be interesting to see what practical application it can be put to. Will the fact that it could be a replacement for "hot" cathodes in TV tubes even be relevant by the time this technology is ready for practical application. With some of the other new technologies that are on the horizon such as OLED's, it will be interesting to see what the life span of the bulky CRT will be.
It's a little suprising how much your view of Television in general changes when you get a PVR. When I originally bought mine I thought it would be a nifty little gadget, now it's painful to go to someone's home that doesn't have one. I'd forgotten how obnoxious commercial's can be.
I hope they have some solid security built in with the Web Server, I would be devastated if someone hacked my Tivo and deleted all my scheduled recordings.
It's really nice to see an introductory article written on Open Source. Particularly one written in a positive light, and without reference to Geeks or Zealots.
I wonder how long it will take the M$ team to start churning out response articles alleging that Open Source is destroying capitalism.
I have extensively used both of the Microsoft Database products Access and SQL Server. I have found that there is a huge difference between the two. (One interesting side note, M$ claimed that Access was a full competitor to Oracle until it released SQL Server at which point Access suddenly became suited only for the desktop - which I might add is where it belonged all along)
Access uses a Jet engine which is not a relational engine at all, while it supports many of the relational semantics - the way it handles the calls under the hood is not relational at all. To get a result set from a query, it locks the entire table and loops through it one record at a time and examines each record, if the record meets the criterea it is then added to the resultset. Now imagine adding multi-table joins to this situation and you have multiple tables locked exclusively at the table level for a single query. This is fine for small (very) low user situations. However when you start talking about more than a handful of users you start getting serious table contention.
SQL Server on the other hand implements a very nice relational engine that is very fast and scales very well to large numbers of users. SQL Server offers things like indexing, B-Tree searches that operate on those indexes, a very good query optimizer, stored proc caching, connection management, row level locking and an entire host of other things including security, replication, clustering fail over support and many others that Access doesn't.
This doesn't make Access necessarily a bad thing, unless you are trying to use it for something it was never really designed to do.
I operate a small consulting company that builds web based database systems. In the past SQL Sever has been a nice alternative to say Oracle or Sybase because of it's relatively low price yet high performance and the abundance of features offered. However the trend of late has been for the price to continue to rise dramatically in the cost of SQL Server. I now find myself looking for alternatives such as MySQL that can eventually replace SQL Server. I've only played with it a little bit, but from what I understand it still lacks some of the basic features that will really set it apart as an Enterprise Class RDBMS. Simple things like transaction support and views are very important in many business applications.
I know that myself and many other small consulting companies are eagerly looking for a low cost (free) alternative to one of the more expensive systems, but as of yet I haven't seen anything that will work reliably enough and fast enough to do the job.
Starting with the above assumption, and you intended to screen out all robots, and internal traffic, I still don't know how you could come up with a really solid figure. Because you can't simply count each hit as there are typically repeat users. So you could try and look only for unique IP addresses. However this has its own problem, there are a lot of companies that use proxy servers when they go out to the web. So you could have 1000 hits per month from some organization, but because of their use of a proxy server if you counted only unique IP addresses you'd only end up with a couple (depending on how many IP's they use for their proxy server). So it seems like on the one hand your inflating your numbers, but on the other hand your slitting your own throat by under reporting your numbers.
It would be intersting to see some type of mathematical equation that could in someway account for the use of proxies.
I have been in the industry for nearly ten years, as well as going to school during a good portion of that time.
Something that I've noticed about people who have been to college vs. those who haven't is that the people who've been, "typically" have a better foundation of knowldege, as well as a better theoretical understanding of the fundamental technology.
When you work at a job you only learn the things necessary to get your job done efficiently. When you go to school you get a good technological foundation for a good portion of the technologies. Even though the specific application isn't necessarily what's in use today, a good theoretical foundation will allow you to ramp up on any specifics far more quickly than someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals.
The people with degrees also tend to outpace those without degrees in the long run, both technologically and finanacially.
Everyone can think of some success stories, but they are not the norm. Besides, Bill Gates skipped college and look what happened to him, is there any better argument for going to college?
I have an unlised phone number and I've tried to find my information online and have thankfully been unsuccessful. The only place that I've been able to find myself is classmates.com and that is something that I actually registered for.
I would bet that all of the information that they are getting is coming from public information e.g. documents filed by the court, phone book, web sites you've registered at...
They serve a necessary function: keeping society in order. Obviously, the FBI needs some kind of tools so that, when they have the proper reasons to, they can apprehend criminals. Carnivore is just one of those tools.
Since an e-mail is just another form of sending a letter. By this line of reasoning, why doesn't the government perform routine inspections of letters passing through the U.S. postal service? Could it be this would be too invasive because people would know? The only reason that people won't be as fired up about this, is because they don't think it will happen to them...and if it did, they wouldn't know.
Better yet, I think we should put up listening devices that record all sounds in public gathering places...maybe cameras too. Then people wouldn't be able to hide in public places and commit crimes any more.
Come on, we have the lessons of history to look back on. Do not allow our freedoms to be taken like this. We WILL regret it.
I think everyone can agree that catching child molesters and their like is important. However treading on our freedoms to do it is simply too great a cost. I recently finished re-reading Orwell's 1984. It is truly chilling to see how many of the "restrictions" on privacy that were portrayed as worst case in that book are coming true.
Haven't we given up enough freedoms at this point? I think it's time that we start reclaiming some of the freedoms that we've already lost.
While it's certainly true that we need to allow a certain amount of policing of the populace in order to maintain the safety of the individuals. I have to question this method. What guarantees do we have that Carnivore will be used only on the "criminals"? How would we even know if they were monitoring our personal e-mails? It seems like we need some sort of system within the government it self to monitor the monitors.
My fear is the potential for abuse and misuse by misguided or simply power hungry individuals is simply too great.
Some type of watch dog agency with the power to evaluate the protections and privacy afforded to citizens, and evaluate certain random cases to ensure that where these tools were used, they were used properly.
Personally I really like the moderation / meta moderation system used at Slashdot. It gives us the ability to police ourselves, yet it provides a certain check / balance against misuse of that same power.
Perhaps this is in some way related to Echelon. Supposedly they track a very large percentage of all e-mails, phone calls etc. Maybe this is just another extension to it. Whatever the case, whether this is part of Carnivore or Echelon or just a useful utility for cataloguing and searching channels, it would serve us well to keep an eye out for potential misuse / invasion of our privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
As the main post points out this is pretty much a weekly news release from Microsoft. It's interesting because in some ways I get suprised by the severity of the bugs such as allowing a huge hole in the Java VM, that would allow someone to format your hard drive or a bug in Proxy Server that would allow a single mal-formed packed to max the CPU at 100%. On the other hand I'm suprised Microsoft doesn't have more of these bugs.
I think this is where the philosophical differences of Open Source Software really make a big difference. Even though OSS still has bugs, the live testing cycle is un-paralleled. However I think the biggest difference boils down to this: there is no one saying we have to have this product out the door by XX date. Rather it becomes stable when it's ready, but you can use the development version if you need or want.
As the lines of code in software grows and the complexity increases, I think we will see a greater number of more sever bugs in closed source systems. Ultimately I believe this will be one of the critical factors leading to OSS's long term success.
I have been using Mozilla because I love the tabbed browser windows. I was completely unaware of all the extra features it offers.
The DOM Inspector will be really nice for checking out the rendered structure of a page. I've always had a tough time with this since I generate most of my pages dynamically. In fact most of those tools will be *incredibly* useful in that context.
I have to say I'm really impressed with the progress the Mozilla team is making. For a while there IE was leading the way, now that trend has clearly reversed.
"Other applications developed at the Human Media Lab include a pair
of robotic eyes that allow a computer to look back at the user"
People are already get skitish when they think someone is watching
them, it would be interesting to see how they'd react when the
computer really is watching them.
I wonder how well suited this technology will be for practical
application. I'm a fan of the plan for spam laid out by Paul Graham,
http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html and as he notes in his
articles one of the most important things with filters is the false
positive rate. Will the computer be able to accurately assess if I'm
in the middle of an important task and not disturb me? What if the
incoming message is more important, and it's urgent that it distracts
me? If they could solve these issues, I think it could have some
potential. Interruptions are a big problem IMHO in the work place.
M$ Boot Disks
7 0.html?tag= list
/ pstools .shtml
If you have to build a boot disk for a M$ machine, putergeek is
invaluable since M$ doesn't seem to want to you to boot to a DOS
prompt any more. You can find Win95B, WinME and Dos Bootdisks.
http://www.putergeek.com/downloads/
RegClean
If you do any development using COM or ActiveX components then
RegClean is a must have tool for fixing registry problems.
http://download.com.com/3000-2094-8814
PsTools
Listed in the Article are FileMon and RegMon from
Sysinternals.com, but I would add PsTools to that list. This
suite of tools is incredibly useful for diagnosing and solving a
vast array of problems. PsKill is probably my most frequently
used tool when I need to actually KILL a process instead of
politely requesting it to exit via End Task.
Oh and nearly everything works on remote machines as well.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware
MDAC Utility
If you have to deal with programs accessing a variety of
Microsoft Data Access sources, the MDAC Component Checker is
essential. It's unbelievable to me how typical it is that MDAC
get's corrupted.
www.microsoft.com/data
Unfortunately, most of the essential tools relate to Microsoft
Software, but the reality is that it seems to be more difficult
to find "good" utilities to trouble shoot and fix problems under
a Microsoft OS than pretty much any other OS I've worked on.
Microsoft also publishes a tool that will automatically identify
any known security vulnerabilites that need to be patched, but I
can't find the link off hand. Again for a Microsoft OS it is
pretty handy.
I understood this to be a discussion forum, I wasn't aware we had to present original research in order to post.
Which of those technologies you cited, did you invent?
If you don't have anything to add to the discussion, just put down someone else's post?
Just because you already knew that, doesn't mean that everyone is as enlightened as you. I was excited by the prospect of the combination of the two technologies. I never thought it was an original idea, nor did I present it as such.
Fusion seems to be the ultimate goal for energy. Offering a
clean and abundant power supply that could potentially alter our
entire power production system. One of the problems with the
transition to a hydrogen based economy has been that energy is
required to extract the hydrogen from known reserves (petroleum,
water, etc). The most common solution offered seems to be solar
powered systems, however fusion could offer a great alternative
which in the long run may prove more viable and more extensively
useable than solar, hydro-electric, or wind power individually,
maybe even collectively.
It's particularly encouraging to see the scientists questioned
their results and tested for extraneous sources before
publishing preliminary findings.
It sounds interesting, although it's hard to put too much weight
into it yet because their results have yet to be independently
verified. He also hasn't even shown it can "expel mangetic
fields to conclusivlely prove that the state is
superconducting."
At least the heading of the article was posted with a question
mark, rather than as an authoritative claim.
If the claim proves to be true, it would be interesting to see
what practical application it can be put to. Will the fact that
it could be a replacement for "hot" cathodes in TV tubes even be
relevant by the time this technology is ready for practical
application. With some of the other new technologies that are
on the horizon such as OLED's, it will be interesting to see
what the life span of the bulky CRT will be.
It's a little suprising how much your view of Television in general changes when you get a PVR. When I originally bought mine I thought it would be a nifty little gadget, now it's painful to go to someone's home that doesn't have one. I'd forgotten how obnoxious commercial's can be.
I hope they have some solid security built in with the Web Server, I would be devastated if someone hacked my Tivo and deleted all my scheduled recordings.
What do you mean Dragon Ball Z didn't record?!?!
It's really nice to see an introductory article written on Open Source. Particularly one written in a positive light, and without reference to Geeks or Zealots.
I wonder how long it will take the M$ team to start churning out response articles alleging that Open Source is destroying capitalism.
Lol, that's my sig...I wasn't applying it to the article in any way shape or form.
I don't understand why getting money from DARPA makes them uncomfortable. He mentions it comes with no strings attached.
Shouldn't we be happy about grants like this that will promote and advance Open Source software in general?
I have extensively used both of the Microsoft Database products Access and SQL Server. I have found that there is a huge difference between the two. (One interesting side note, M$ claimed that Access was a full competitor to Oracle until it released SQL Server at which point Access suddenly became suited only for the desktop - which I might add is where it belonged all along)
Access uses a Jet engine which is not a relational engine at all, while it supports many of the relational semantics - the way it handles the calls under the hood is not relational at all. To get a result set from a query, it locks the entire table and loops through it one record at a time and examines each record, if the record meets the criterea it is then added to the resultset. Now imagine adding multi-table joins to this situation and you have multiple tables locked exclusively at the table level for a single query. This is fine for small (very) low user situations. However when you start talking about more than a handful of users you start getting serious table contention.
SQL Server on the other hand implements a very nice relational engine that is very fast and scales very well to large numbers of users. SQL Server offers things like indexing, B-Tree searches that operate on those indexes, a very good query optimizer, stored proc caching, connection management, row level locking and an entire host of other things including security, replication, clustering fail over support and many others that Access doesn't.
This doesn't make Access necessarily a bad thing, unless you are trying to use it for something it was never really designed to do.
I operate a small consulting company that builds web based database systems. In the past SQL Sever has been a nice alternative to say Oracle or Sybase because of it's relatively low price yet high performance and the abundance of features offered. However the trend of late has been for the price to continue to rise dramatically in the cost of SQL Server. I now find myself looking for alternatives such as MySQL that can eventually replace SQL Server. I've only played with it a little bit, but from what I understand it still lacks some of the basic features that will really set it apart as an Enterprise Class RDBMS. Simple things like transaction support and views are very important in many business applications.
I know that myself and many other small consulting companies are eagerly looking for a low cost (free) alternative to one of the more expensive systems, but as of yet I haven't seen anything that will work reliably enough and fast enough to do the job.
News Flash: DC has now added to their EULA for CC that you *must* trust them. Resistance is futile..
Starting with the above assumption, and you intended to screen out all robots, and internal traffic, I still don't know how you could come up with a really solid figure. Because you can't simply count each hit as there are typically repeat users. So you could try and look only for unique IP addresses. However this has its own problem, there are a lot of companies that use proxy servers when they go out to the web. So you could have 1000 hits per month from some organization, but because of their use of a proxy server if you counted only unique IP addresses you'd only end up with a couple (depending on how many IP's they use for their proxy server). So it seems like on the one hand your inflating your numbers, but on the other hand your slitting your own throat by under reporting your numbers.
It would be intersting to see some type of mathematical equation that could in someway account for the use of proxies.
I have been in the industry for nearly ten years, as well as going to school during a good portion of that time.
Something that I've noticed about people who have been to college vs. those who haven't is that the people who've been, "typically" have a better foundation of knowldege, as well as a better theoretical understanding of the fundamental technology.
When you work at a job you only learn the things necessary to get your job done efficiently. When you go to school you get a good technological foundation for a good portion of the technologies. Even though the specific application isn't necessarily what's in use today, a good theoretical foundation will allow you to ramp up on any specifics far more quickly than someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals.
The people with degrees also tend to outpace those without degrees in the long run, both technologically and finanacially.
Everyone can think of some success stories, but they are not the norm. Besides, Bill Gates skipped college and look what happened to him, is there any better argument for going to college?
Doug Tolton dtolton@yahoo.com
I have an unlised phone number and I've tried to find my information online and have thankfully been unsuccessful. The only place that I've been able to find myself is classmates.com and that is something that I actually registered for.
I would bet that all of the information that they are getting is coming from public information e.g. documents filed by the court, phone book, web sites you've registered at...
They serve a necessary function: keeping society in order. Obviously, the FBI needs some kind of tools so that, when they have the proper reasons to, they can apprehend criminals. Carnivore is just one of those tools.
Since an e-mail is just another form of sending a letter. By this line of reasoning, why doesn't the government perform routine inspections of letters passing through the U.S. postal service? Could it be this would be too invasive because people would know? The only reason that people won't be as fired up about this, is because they don't think it will happen to them...and if it did, they wouldn't know.
Better yet, I think we should put up listening devices that record all sounds in public gathering places...maybe cameras too. Then people wouldn't be able to hide in public places and commit crimes any more.
Come on, we have the lessons of history to look back on. Do not allow our freedoms to be taken like this. We WILL regret it.
I think everyone can agree that catching child molesters and their like is important. However treading on our freedoms to do it is simply too great a cost. I recently finished re-reading Orwell's 1984. It is truly chilling to see how many of the "restrictions" on privacy that were portrayed as worst case in that book are coming true.
Haven't we given up enough freedoms at this point? I think it's time that we start reclaiming some of the freedoms that we've already lost.
While it's certainly true that we need to allow a certain amount of policing of the populace in order to maintain the safety of the individuals. I have to question this method. What guarantees do we have that Carnivore will be used only on the "criminals"? How would we even know if they were monitoring our personal e-mails? It seems like we need some sort of system within the government it self to monitor the monitors.
My fear is the potential for abuse and misuse by misguided or simply power hungry individuals is simply too great.
Some type of watch dog agency with the power to evaluate the protections and privacy afforded to citizens, and evaluate certain random cases to ensure that where these tools were used, they were used properly.
Personally I really like the moderation / meta moderation system used at Slashdot. It gives us the ability to police ourselves, yet it provides a certain check / balance against misuse of that same power.
Perhaps this is in some way related to Echelon. Supposedly they track a very large percentage of all e-mails, phone calls etc. Maybe this is just another extension to it. Whatever the case, whether this is part of Carnivore or Echelon or just a useful utility for cataloguing and searching channels, it would serve us well to keep an eye out for potential misuse / invasion of our privacy.